September 30, 2026

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Welcome to Wednesday! Employees are exaggerating their AI usage to colleagues and company leaders. But you don’t have to stop there! Here are some other things you can embellish at work: your typing speed, coffee consumption, and the number of apps you have open at any given time.

In today’s edition:

🗄️ Moratorium frenzy

📊 Budget light

🫣 Have no fear

—Tricia Crimmins, Billy Hurley, Brianna Monsanto

CLOUD

More moratoriums

Abstract photo collage of a hexagon pattern with a large hole in the middle, framed by a circuit board, which is framed by a purple-tinted hall of servers in a data center, meant to represent the hole that data center moratoriums are leaving, and that IT professionals will need to deal with.

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Unsplash, Adobe Stock

In a staunchly divided country, Americans are pretty aligned on one thing: opposition to data centers. IT pros, though, are in a trickier spot because data center moratoriums could spell trouble for orgs that have woven AI tools into various workflows, if the compute power to keep them running doesn’t get built.

Thus far, 26 states have passed or are considering data center moratoriums and guardrails. Most recently, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order to ensure anything built there complies with specific environmental and affordability requirements.

“If you can’t agree to our strict requirements and get the community where you want to build to say ’yes,’ you’re not going to have the Commonwealth’s support either,” Shapiro said in a press release. “These are some of the biggest companies in the world—they can afford to be good neighbors, follow the rules, and do this right.”

As similar—and stricter—data center bans and limits take effect in states and counties across the country, the legislation could start to affect IT departments’ workflows and budgets. Chiefly, IT professionals will face uncertainty as the availability of compute power shifts. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to get ahead of it.

How will moratoriums impact IT pros?—TC

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IT STRATEGY

Bottom line

Hand of a business person handing money over to AI hand with security shield.

Anna Kim

In the early ’90s, Egon Rinderer would spend his mornings at a US Department of Agriculture facility in Central Illinois as a statistical analysis programmer, running crop projections, and his afternoons as the lab’s one and only IT guy.

From there, he continued his career at a new company managing a small desktop support team, where he suddenly had to become familiar with a budget—a simple one mostly involving salary reviews and raises, but a new responsibility nonetheless. His budgeting duties grew with his career; a later role saw him overseeing a bigger IT spending plan that included staff payments, as well as tools, software, and outside vendor services.

That kind of transition can be tough for an IT pro not used to speaking with executives who are always thinking about the bottom line.

“[Executives] don’t care about lines of code committed per week,” Rinderer, now SVP of public sector and global enterprise at IT operations platform NinjaOne, said. “They care about, how does this tie to revenue? And you’ve got to learn how to speak that language, and that’s a pretty steep learning curve for most people.”

What’s a brag sheet and why is it useful?—BH

IT STRATEGY

Fear factor

Photo collage of a robot hand controlling a computer mouse, and an engineer looking pensive while working at a computer.

Shannon May, Photos: Adobe Stock, Unsplash

Forget the kids…the employees are not alright, and a poor AI culture may be to blame.

According to a September report from IT software company GoTo, 83% of knowledge workers and IT leaders are scared of being blamed, or even fired, for an AI-related mistake, with 31% saying they hesitate to use AI for that reason.

The fear doesn’t stop there: about one-third (31%) of employees feel an “unspoken pressure” at work to keep quiet about AI-related mistakes. Another 14% said they have reported AI errors to a leader, but were told to keep it under wraps.

What’s all the fuss about? Peter Mahoney, chief commercial officer at GoTo, told IT Brew the reluctance to hold AI accountable for its mistakes is likely driven by a desire to reap productivity gains from the technology—a frequent talking point among executives.

What it takes to build a healthy AI culture.—BM

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 68%. That’s the percentage of CISOs who say employees are their organization’s biggest cybersecurity risk. (TechRadar)

Quote: “Sonnet is really for the cost-conscious customer where they might not need as much intelligence.”—Theo Chu, an Anthropic research product manager, on the target audience for the recently released lower-cost AI model (CNBC)

Read: CISA’s CVE program is getting a glow-up. (ITPro)

Defend your uptime: Eaton’s Ace of Uptime puts you in charge of keeping the systems running. Put your skills to the test in the new decks—and remember, every action has consequences.*

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Pixelated mouse arrows attacking personal screens.

Anna Kim

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Written by Tricia Crimmins, Billy Hurley, and Brianna Monsanto

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